Comment 176 for bug 317781

Wow, this thing sure is being actively discussed. I might as well weigh in:

- I side with those that say "lots of small files are a good idea" -- the benefits of having many small human-readable config files are self-evident to anyone who's ever had to deal with the windows registry. Suggesting that linux move to a similar approach is... well, I just can't wrap my head around it. It's crazy. If we take a performance hit on the filesystem to maintain our small file configs, fine, because if we try to do something like the windows registry we'll surely suffer the same (or worse) performance hit later on when it starts to become cluttered, fragmented, and corrupted.

- I'm guessing that most of the cases described by users here as their system "locking up" and needing a hard reset were not actually total lockups. I used to have similar problems with my previous nvidia card -- but really it was only the X server that was locking up (and taking the keyboard with it). Some have already alluded to the solution -- the alt+sysrq keyboard combinations. Pressing alt+sysrq+r during an X lockup will give you keyboard control back* , and then you can use ctrl+alt+f1 to switch to a text console. From there, you can log in and give X a swift kick in the arse without having to resort to the power button, and you won't encounter this filesystem problem. (You can also force a full sync to disk with alt+sysrq+s as I think someone else mentioned.)

*: I don't know why, but in a lot of distros the alt+sysrq stuff is disabled by default. Google it to figure out how to turn it on, and what all the other shortcuts are.